This past weekend I spent three hours with Photographer David Coleman, learning how to tell a story with a photo. Although I have always tried to do that, it is difficult. Coleman, who considers himself a storyteller, made it seem easy.

Here’s an attempt of mine from the past.

Three’s a crowd.

In this photo, I see two companionable puffins having a good time while ignoring the guy on the right, who can’t shut up. It takes a leap of imagination to find a story in this photo.

I came to photography late in life—that is, about five years ago. I wanted to share the experience with Bill (an excellent photographer since his youth) and also to give myself something to do while he was taking pictures. It became clear early on that a lot has changed since my first Brownie Starflash. You need to understand and use a lot of tools to take a technically good photo. On photo shoots, I carry with me a cheat sheet that explains how to deal with Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO. Without it, I would be lost. It is my version of Dumbo’s feather.

Enter David Coleman. Using Henri Cartier-Bresson as an inspiration, Coleman’s method of street photography emphasizes capturing “the decisive moment.” This is something I am good at recognizing but hadn’t been able to capture because I was forever fiddling with the settings and thus missed the moment. Settings still count, but Coleman’s are easy to remember and when the settings and scene align, the results can be very cool. If you want to learn more about his methods and classes, contact David Coleman here.

These are some shots I took yesterday.

Is that a camera?

The only story in this photo is that I captured the moment when the fishmonger discovered I was photographing him and I beat a quick retreat.

Street photograph in Chinatown

In this picture, these folks were enjoying themselves and it was great fun to catch their interaction on a sunny day in Chinatown.

And then there’s this little fella, amusing himself by posing for me while he waits for the parade to start.

Readers of this blog know that I have been cleaning out my in-laws’ house. It is a bittersweet experience. The “bitter” part is the reams of paper and items that haven’t been touched for thirty years but never thrown away. The “sweet” part is all the notes and cards from their children, grandchildren and loving friends that have been saved for more than 70 years. It is a daunting and sometimes rewarding task to sort through the accumulation of two lifetimes.

I recently learned that the Swedes have a practice called “Death Cleaning” (surely this sounds better in Swedish). It encourages older people to clean out their houses so that after their deaths, others will not have to sift through a lifetime of unnecessary accumulation. Yes, the culture that spawned Ikea has a similar no-nonsense approach to life: keep it simple, minimal and do not accumulate a lot of stuff. All of this is laid out in Margareta Magnusson’s new book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.

The idea of decluttering is increasingly popular—in theory, if not in practice. An unscientific sampling (my friends) revealed that most believe they have too much stuff and are planning to get rid of it. Note that they are “planning,” not “doing.” Only those who have had to clear out their parents’ homes are actively “death cleaning.” A couple of years ago Marie Kondo’s book on decluttering encouraged us to surround ourselves only with things that “spark joy.” I can get a few sparks from some books and clothing, but our vacuum cleaner doesn’t spark anything except gratitude that it picks up cat hair. Obviously, sparking joy is only a guideline.

Back at the house, we are getting closer to completion. While it would have been easier to reach this point if my in-laws had done some “death cleaning” beforehand, there is a sense of closure that, surprisingly, feels as if it comes from them. Not that I believe they know what we’re doing, just that in some ways it feels right to handle items that must have sparked their joy along the way.

Some time ago (I can’t remember when) I wrote a blog about Mindfulness. I do remember that one of the people interviewed for an article about the subject said that to be “mindful,” she tells herself what she is doing. An example of this would be, “I am putting my keys in the outside pocket of my purse, now I am putting my purse on the hall table,” etc., etc. Aside from the fact that the woman’s conversations with herself must be incredibly boring, I have found that the tip about where I am putting my keys does work. Unfortunately, I often forget to practice it and therefore lose them. I spend entirely too much time looking for my keys and my phone, so much so that it worries me.

I worry because my father spent the last 15+ years of his life afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. I took a genetic test and discovered that I have the “Alzheimer’s gene.” Never mind that 30% of the population also has that gene; 50% of people with Alzheimer’s also carry it and it scares me. My younger sister and I often compare our ability to remember; my youngest sister is too young to start worrying in earnest (after 65, the odds of Alzheimer’s doubles every 5 years). My brother, on the other hand, says he figures he’ll get it, just like he inherited other genetic traits from our father. I can’t be so cavalier. I am used to watching my body change despite all my efforts to keep things up where they used to be. Sure, I miss my waistline but that’s nothing compared to missing my brain. I consider my brain to be my best feature and to lose its ability to function would be a disaster (though one I probably won’t know happened).

Take my keys (please!)–it’s a sign of normal forgetfulness to lose one’s keys; it is a sign of something malign to forget what the damn keys are for.

2. Anything that is good for the heart is good for the brain. Eighty percent of people with Alzheimer’s also have some form of cardiovascular disease.

3 and 4. Exercise “fertilizes” the brain and sleep “cleanses” it. A good amount of both may ward off or postpone symptoms.

5. Finally, a statistic only an epidemiologist could love: if onset of the illness can be postponed by five years, it would halve the number of Alzheimer’s patients. Guess why! They’ll die of something else!

Last week I began an overwhelming task: clearing out the house of family members who died. They had lived in the same place for 60 years and it seems as if they never threw anything away. I have listened for years to my friends’ stories of dealing with their aging parents’ belongings but it was not until now, when I am doing the same thing, that I truly understand what an enormous undertaking it is.

Neither we nor our adult children want or need any more furniture or furnishings. In addition, though some items in the house were expensive (china, silverware, some of the furniture) they are no longer in style and so worth very little. The solution becomes a garage sale, estate sale, charitable donation or a combination. Somehow I can’t tolerate the idea of those familiar pieces laid out on tables in the driveway but the thought of a dumpster is even worse.

The most difficult task for me was to sort through the bedroom closets and dresser drawers. I thought of my mother-in-law when I first met her, clicking around the kitchen in one of the many pairs of high heels she owned. With the exception of Donna Reed, I had never seen anyone doing dishes in high heels. And then there were the purses, the sweaters, the gardening clothes—remnants of a whole life. The smaller the items –tubes of lipstick, bottles of nail polish—the harder to throw in the trash bag.

There is a positive side to this sad task. It is a strong incentive to clear out one’s life and keep only those things that “spark joy,” as Marie Kondo says in her popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Now when I look at my closet, I imagine my daughter or sons someday wondering why I ever bought those velvet stretch leggings or thought I looked good in brown lipstick. Goodwill, here I come!

Ladybug, ladybug fly away home,Your house is on fire and your children are gone,All except one,And her name is Ann,And she hid under the baking pan.

(English rhyme circa 1744)

Our house is not on fire, though it is only a few blocks away from site of the massive conflagration of 1991. Our children are gone but not far, we have indeed flown away home, and ladybugs have descended all around us in the Oakland hills, where they are hibernating for the winter.

Yesterday Bill Popik took these photos of some of the thousands of ladybugs who are drawn here annually by the climate and the scent of previous hibernators’ pheromones. The clustering keeps them warm, hydrated and provides a wealth of opportunities for ladybug orgies. Despite their cheerful coloration, most hikers walk right past without noticing the moving red mass only inches from the trail.

Still more ladybugs.

Everybody loves ladybugs. They are gardeners’ best friends because they are voracious eaters of aphids and other plant-eating pests. I have had two close encounters with masses of ladybugs: one when a horrified babysitter opened a box of them I had ordered and in her fright sucked them up with a Dust Buster. I had to leave work to drive home and rescue the poor things. (This may seem callous but I had more sympathy for the ladybugs than I did for the sitter.) The other occasions have been during New England winters when they come into the house and gather up high in the corners inside the house. That isn’t a good thing because you can’t really scoop them up and most die of dehydration. There are always a couple of hardy souls who make it through the winter and are fun to release in the spring.

To my friends and neighbors who are braving the New England winter: keep warm, stay hydrated and remember that spring is only a few months away.

NOTE: If you want to know more about ladybugs, check out this excellent site: The Ladybug Lady

In a year that too often seemed like fiction, my favorite novel was one that felt utterly true to life: “Conversations with Friends,” by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. It tells the story of Frances, a watchful, sharp-witted college student in Dublin and her best friend, Bobbi, who together fall into a risky intimacy with Melissa and Nick, a couple in their thirties with glamorous artistic credentials and a fraying marriage. Like the best coming-of-age novels, it captures the beautiful confusion of being an intelligent young person with lots of ideas about the world and no clue how to live in it. Much has been made of Rooney’s gift for capturing the gab of others, as advertised in her title. But fiction is really the medium of thought, and Rooney, who writes with commanding, unself-conscious lucidity, proves a terrific portraitist of Frances’s mind, with its peaks of humor and insight and troughs of poignant self-delusion. This is the first novel that Rooney has written; I was so engrossed in its world that when I finished it, I flipped back to the first page and read it straight through again. I hope her next book comes soon.

If there were a way to invite the protagonists of 2017 fiction to a lunch in their honor, I’d propose seating Frances next to Selin, the exquisitely awkward heroine of Elif Batuman’s début novel, “The Idiot.” Selin, too, is a college student with a mightily bookish brain and a paucity of knowledge gleaned from experience. Thinking of her shuffling around Harvard’s silent, snowy campus without her gloves on (she lost them again), or in a tiny village in Hungary, where she has gone for the summer to teach English out of severely misjudged love for an elusive math major, makes me laugh even now. On Selin’s other side, I’m tempted to put Christina, from the short-story collection “Sour Heart,” another notable début, by Jenny Zhang. True, Christina, the daughter of Chinese immigrants living in a series of squalid apartments in New York, is only a kid, but she has a startlingly adult way of expressing herself, and so much rude, buoyant energy that she seems to practically bounce off the page; I think her brashness would do Selin some good. I also want to include Z, the mercenary girlfriend-experience prostitute from Katherine Faw’s “Ultraluminous,” which has much to say about the kind of obscene obeisance that certain men want from women, and the lengths that they will go to get it. The novel has a meticulously polished surface and a molten, furious core; I read it a few weeks before the #MeToo revelations began, and it has hung in my mind like a backdrop to everything that has followed since.

And if real, flesh-and-blood people would deign to join this table of make-believe, I’d extend an invitation, too, to Grace Paley, whose short stories, essays, and poems, collected together for the first time in this year’s “A Grace Paley Reader,” were politically and artistically galvanizing to me, and also a source of deep comfort during this bitter year. Next to her must go her fellow West Villager Tamara Shopsin, whose memoir “Arbitrary Stupid Goal” is a paean to her childhood in and around her family’s legendary restaurant down on Bedford Street when Greenwich Village still felt like a village and weirdos ruled the roost. It’s hard to reflect on the lost past with a love that doesn’t dip into maudlin nostalgia, but Shopsin makes it look as easy as pie.—Alexandra Schwartz

At the beginning of 2017, I started working on a Profile of someone who’s secure in his faith (Rod Dreher, an orthodox Christian); at the end, I wrote about a philosopher who thinks we live in a cruel, pointless universe (David Benatar, an “anti-natalist” who argues that we should stop having children). In between, this turned out to be the year in which I read about the meaning of life. Two writers, in particular, helped me navigate the territory between believing in God and becoming a nihilist. The first was Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, whom I profiled in March. I deeply enjoyed his newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” but two of his earlier volumes struck me with particular force: the accessible and elegant “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” from 1995, and the more academic “Freedom Evolves,” from 2003. In the first, Dennett helps us understand what it means to occupy a branch on the tree of life; in the second, he argues that free will is real, and shows how it could have evolved along with the rest of the living world. You may be bored of Darwin by now, and of the reductive, triumphalist rhetoric that often accompanies discussions about evolution and our place in the universe. That’s not what Dennett offers. I know of no other thinker who so convincingly shows how human life, in all its vivid, soulful richness, might make sense as part of a purely material universe.

The other writer was Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale Law School whose book “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan” took me on a parallel journey. (I profiled Kronman, too.) If Dennett seeks to reconcile the existence of the soul with the physical world—to connect bacteria to Bach—Kronman sets out to do something similar in the humanist tradition: he tries to integrate the many contradictory ways of thinking about life that, as modern people, we want to credit simultaneously. Many of us have intuitions about the sacredness of life but also believe in the scientific method, which leaves little room for the sacred; we find it hard to envision a literal afterlife but want to understand how we might matter after we’re gone. Kronman combs through the history of thought, combining Augustine with Wallace Stevens, or Nietzsche with Melanie Klein, and constructing a belief system of his own invention—“born-again paganism”—which he finds satisfying. You don’t have to read all of Kronman’s “Confessions” in one go, and you’re unlikely to find it all convincing. But his beautifully written book is illuminating and inspiring. It shows that all of us can try, in our own ways, to solve the riddle of existence.—Joshua Rothman

I’ve never read as furiously or as gratefully as I did this year, searching for something that would both take me out of myself and return me to myself, the way only books can. I went on some retrospective expeditions—I had a good streak of reading all of James Salter and Nora Ephron in succession—but there was plenty of wonder released in 2017. I loved “The Correspondence,” by J. D. Daniels, a beyond-slim collection of essays (two billed as fiction) that left me feeling drunk and dizzy, like I had been given an injection of a stranger’s soul. I laughed out loud at “Priestdaddy,” Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, which works like transubstantiation: no matter what you think you’re looking at on the page, it’s turning into something else. I have been regularly recommending Alissa Nutting’s horrifically funny novel “Made for Love,” as well as Jenny Zhang’s “Sour Heart” and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky,” two collections that use the short-story format’s mix of intensity and absence to knock you out. “Evicted,” Matthew Desmond’s chronicle of Milwaukee poverty, deserved its Pulitzer and then some. “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s deliciously over-reported oral history of early-aughts New York rock, was a monument to the scuzzy magic that occurs when youth, hedonism, ambition, and talent coincide. I couldn’t put down Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends” or Julie Buntin’s “Marlena,” both of them début novels about the kind of complicated friendship that determines the course of a young woman’s life.—Jia Tolentino

For the past several Christmas seasons, this blog has featured our family’s version of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Though “One Christmas was much like another in those years around the sea town corner” of Marion, Massachusetts, this year we are in Oakland, California and…well, it’s different! Dylan Thomas’ lovely Christmas poem no longer applies.

This year, instead of this quintessentially New England holiday display:

we have this:

Holiday Decorations by a neighbor.

Luckily, there is one enduring feature, wherever we are: the Christmas Cat.

CatmanDeux

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa and whatever else brings you together with your family and friends during this season!

I’m not a quitter. I’m proud of that, so it was a wrenching decision I made last week (la semana pasada) to quit my Intermediate Spanish class. I agonized about it for weeks, not only because I’m not a quitter but also for some more important (to me, anyway) reasons.

First, I would freeze every time I was called upon to speak in Spanish. When I managed to stumble through a few sentences, they were full of the simplest possible adjectives: bad, sad, good, great. I sounded like Donald Trump but with a pretty good accent.

Second, my memory isn’t that great anymore. The many irregular verbs and their conjugations that I reviewed so carefully didn’t seem to want to stick around. Somewhere along the way, I’ve forgotten how to memorize. It reminds me of the Billy Collins line from “Forgetfulness:”

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.It has floated away down a dark mythological riverwhose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

Third, it was both a shock and a relief to learn that I am at least 30 years older than everyone else in the class. My first reaction was “Whaaaat??” My second reaction was, “No wonder all these people have such good memories.”

So now I am back to listening to Coffee Break Spanish as I perform daily mundane tasks, happy in the knowledge that whatever I don’t remember I can replay. It makes me feel like I’m not a quitter.

As Christmas and Hanukkah approach, it’s time to think about gifts. I enjoy buying presents for my granddaughter but finding appropriate presents for the adults in our family is not so easy. Just for fun, I searched the web to see what merchants are suggesting as gifts for adults this year. The Grommet features an Automatic Floss Dispenser, a Golf Club Cleaner, and a Microwave Bacon Cooker. And if those choices aren’t ridiculous enough, J. Peterman promotes a Four-tier Folding Cake Stand and a Bull Lead with a Copper Nose Ring (for the bullfighter in your life?). And just for the guys in your life, Mancrates proposes a Salami Bouquet or an Exotic Meats Jerkygram. Jerky indeed.

There have been some unfortunate gifts in Christmases past. One year my mother-in-law bought me some jumbo-size underpants, then apologized profusely when she saw the look on my face. A year or so later, my parents bought Bill an electric shaver, even though he had had a full beard for years.

Family gatherings over the holidays can be difficult. A psychiatrist friend once said to me regarding his patient caseload: “Christmastime is my High Season.” For some families, it is the one time of the year everyone gets together and the rich stew of irritation, competition, resentment and chronic misunderstanding can bubble over. Christmases in my family when I was a kid were like something out of an Irish short story. My mother and her mother had a tense relationship. My father would get tipsy early in the evening when my mother was not keeping an eye on the bourbon bottle. There were lots of presents and we kids tore into them at the same time, so frantically that the whole process was over in minutes and then we were disappointed that it went so fast. Meanwhile, the mother of my great-aunt-by-marriage, the oldest person I had ever seen, dozed in the corner. It was a Dylan Thomas scene without the poetry.

When the details leading to Matt Lauer’s firing broke a couple of days ago, my first thoughts were with his victims and my second take was, “Did he really think exposing himself was alluring?” This was not a new question. I had already wondered the same about Harvey Weinstein, Louie C.K., Charlie Rose and John Conyers.

This is one of the differences between men and women. Research* into women’s pornography-viewing habits reveals that women find the female body more attractive than the male’s; certainly artists have shared that belief for centuries. Men apparently don’t. I learned as the mother of two boys that at a very young age, males are proud of their genitals. I also have a daughter and the subject never came up. My sons were sensitive little guys, so they even sympathized with me for not being as lucky as they were.

Now we have grown men acting as if they never got beyond the pride of a four-year- old. Judging from the behavior of the aforementioned group, those men believe women are going to be shocked and awed into submission by the sight of their private parts. Women just don’t think that way. It is hard to imagine even the most predatory, powerful female CEO inviting a male subordinate into her office, locking the door, and dropping her designer pants.

Like many people, I wonder how many more days I will wake up to the news that one more famous man has taken advantage of the power of his position to force himself on unwilling women, men or children. To the men who are waking up during the night, wondering when they will be “outed” and lose their jobs: it is too late to undo past bad behavior but it is not too late to grow up. My mother-in-law would have said, in a different context, “pull up your socks.” To the sleepless transgressors out there: you know what you need to pull up.